Gunnar Myrdal

Gunnar Myrdal (6 December 1898-17 May 1987) was a Swedish social democratic economist and sociologist who was awarded the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy helped to kickstart the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.

Biography
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was born in Skattungbyn, Dalarna, Sweden in 1898, and he studied in Britain, Germany, and the United States. He was an early supporter of John Maynard Keynes' economic system, but he claimed that he had invented Keynesian economics when he published Monetary Economics in 1932, four years before Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. He served in Parliament in 1933 as a Swedish Social Democratic Party MP and served as Trade Minister under Tage Erlander's government from 1945 to 1947. During World War II, he was staunchly and publicly anti-Nazi and praised the USA's democratic institutions. In 1944, he wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, in which he claimed that the US government was unable to extend its ideals of freedom to the African-American tenth of its population. However, he controversially claimed that, "It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into Americna culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by dominant white Americans." He also claimed that "in practically all divergences, American Negro culture is...a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture," controversial views which supported assimilationism. From 1960 to 1967, he served as a professor of international economics at Stockholm University, and he won the 1974 Nobel Prize for his work on the interdependence of economic, social, and institutional phenomena. He died in 1987.